Language Log

"UPDATE 1-China tells U.S. to remove 'black hands' from Hong Kong"

China's allegations of U.S. "black hands" fomenting unrest in Hong Kong have been all over the news during the last few days.  Politically, no one knows exactly what the PRC is referring to (they haven't given any evidence for the involvement of American officials).  Linguistically, the origin of this expression in Chinese is far from clear.

In "Which justifies what?" (7/3/2019) and "Thematic spoonerisms" (7/14/2019), we noted cases where writers exchanged noun phrases so as to produce literally nonsensical propositions: the inconvenience didn't justify the cause instead of the cause didn't justify the inconvenience, and ampicillin is resistant to multiple strains of U.T.I.s instead of multiple strains of U.T.I.s are resistant to ampicillin.

In this morning's email, Bob Ladd point out a letter referencing the story where the inconvenience didn't justify the cause, not to complain about the swap but to repeat it — "Have your inconvenience now and avoid it later", The New Scientist 7/17/2019:

Chelsea Whyte mentions that many people resented the disruption that the Extinction Rebellion protests created because they “felt the inconvenience didn’t justify the cause” (22 June, p 20). I think this sums up the global attitude to action on climate change.

Maybe people need to be reminded of the inconveniences that global warming will cause. Instead of stopping trains, perhaps future protests should cordon off low-lying coastal areas and hand out flippers and snorkels to those who want to enter?

Any complaints can be met with a polite reminder that this will soon become a permanent inconvenience.

Shared by David Cowhig:

Ivanka Trump congratulates Boris Johnson:

John Lawler writes:

I recently had reason to ask the following question of Google

https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+words+does+the+average+person+say+in+a+day

and the result turned up an old LL post, which is great, except the selection algorithm picked the wrong number as the answer, and even quoted the post you were complaining about as if it were true.

This should probably be brought to someone's attention, but it seems, what with the vast amounts of irony, hyperbole, bullshit, lying, and fact-checking on the net, this is not an isolated problem.

Sam Dorman, "AOC says Trump 'relished' rally chant about Omar, doesn't want to be president anymore", Fox News 7/20/2019:

"Once you start telling American citizens to 'go back to your own countries,' this tells you that this President's policies are not about immigration, it's about ethnicity and racism," Ocasio-Cortez went on to applause from the town hall crowd. "And his biggest mistake is that he said the quiet part loud. That was his biggest mistake because we know that he's been thinking this the entire time."

Menachem Wecker, "One NRA fights for guns. One for restaurants. Yes, D.C. has abbreviation overload.", WaPo 7/15/2019:

It was the malapropism heard around certain corners of social media. When Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) asked Ben Carson recently about REOs — real estate owned properties — the housing and urban development secretary appeared to hear a reference to cookies, i.e., Oreos. While the incident quickly became a referendum on Carson's knowledge of housing policy — he would later dismiss the episode as gotcha politics, telling ABC News, "Give me a break," perhaps a subconscious Kit Kat allusion — it did point to a frequently overlooked hazard of life in Washington: Acronyms and other abbreviations, a second language for many wonks, can be confusing, problematic or simply embarrassing.

This came across Jeff DeMarco's Facebook yesterday:

Just to show you how up to date Language Log can be, in this post we'll be talking about a neologism that is only a few weeks old in China.  The term is "jīwá 鸡娃“, which literally means "chicken baby / child / doll".

The term surfaced abruptly and began circulating virally on social media, following a heated discussion over two articles on K-12 education (the links are here and here).  The articles are respectively about the fierce competition among parents in Haidian and Shunyi districts of Beijing municipality.  Haidian is a large district in the northwestern part of Beijing with many famous tourist attractions, outstanding universities, and top IT firms.  Shunyi district is in the northeastern part of Beijing.  Although it is not as large and powerful as Haidian, it is also considered a very desirable place to live because of its posh villas, easy access to the international airport, and China's largest international exhibition center, but above all — from a parent's point of view — some of the best private and international schools in the country.

Today's SMBC:

Mouseover title: "The other day I was really freaked out that a computer could generate faces of people who DON'T REALLY EXIST, only to later realize painters have been doing this for several millenia."

Brian Costa, "Rory McIlroy’s British Open Chances Collapse on the First Hole", WSJ 7/18/2019 [emphasis added]:

Rory McIlroy stepped into the first tee box at Royal Portrush on Thursday morning and waved to a roaring crowd. He knew it would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience: his opening tee shot at the first British Open held in his native country in more than half a century. […]

This is the same course where, as a 16-year-old amateur in 2005, he shot a 61, which remains the course record. This is a tournament in which McIlroy has not failed to finish outside the top five since 2013 (he missed it with an injury in 2015). This is a player who, as measured by strokes gained—which compares a player’s score to the field average—has been the best on the PGA Tour this season.

The genesis of this post lies in the following newspaper headline:

"Ich Bin Ein Hong Konger:  How Hong Kong is turning into the West Berlin of the quasi-cold war between the West and China", by Melinda Liu, Foreign Policy (7/16/19)

Every historically literate person immediately recognizes the allusion to John F. Kennedy's famous speech in West Berlin on June 26, 1963:

Speaking from a platform erected on the steps of Rathaus Schöneberg for an audience of 450,000, Kennedy said,

Two thousand years ago, the proudest boast was civis romanus sum ["I am a Roman citizen"]. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is "Ich bin ein Berliner!"… All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words "Ich bin ein Berliner!"

For those interested in the history of concepts and techniques in phonetics, I've scanned the Proceedings of the Third International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (1938), all 550-odd pages of it. Warning: 23 MB .pdf file.